Finding Calm Joy: How To Start A Meditation Practice with Tea

When life is a ceremony, everything is divine.

In this space, you will learn how to start a simple practice with just some leaves and hot water, and how sitting in ceremony and drinking Tea with reverence can transport the mundane to the magical. This is Cha Dao, The Way of Tea.

Commit to healing yourself. Your commitment to making space for meditation is the primary meditation.

If you find it difficult to incorporate any meditation into your daily life, or seek to deepen your meditation practice but are feeling stuck in the middle realm where you can't seem to bring the tranquillity you gain into real life, then this will be extremely useful for you.

As our Tea teacher Wu De wrote in Tea Medicine, "Sometimes you may feel as if your meditation is blissful, but that peace is soon forgotten when you get into traffic. Tea helps bridge ordinary life. As they say, 'if you have problems, drink Tea; if you don't have problems, drink Tea!' Tea can be a celebration of our life from the mundane to the sacred space or help translate the sacred space into our ordinary day."

Picture this: these Tea leaves are from the mountains, where air is untainted, and roots of the trees reach deep into the soil, and these leaves encapsulate the rain, clouds, sunlight and stars and moonlight. This means you can meditate and go quantum and shift your consciousness to become open minded and open hearted to infinite answers, deepen your spirituality with it, and you can also use it as an anchor to the present moment. For me, Tea is able to translate the sacred space into my everyday life. There is something bigger than us at work here, The Universe, that keeps our blood pumping, the seasons turning. If we could remember how it is like to act from within, from Nature's way, we would find peace and so many things we so desperately want to control, just seem so unnecessarily magnified.

Social Distancing Update:

Now, as we adjust to these winds of change, we look at serving Tea virtually, instilling stillness and presence of mind across the digital waves. You can still participate by simply finding a quiet corner and sitting in silence with me during the tea ceremony. What you need:

1. A bowl or cup is fine too. Prepare a flask or kettle of hot water.  If you have no loose leaf teas around, simply pour this steaming hot water into the bowl/cup and drink in tandem with me.

2. As you sit in silence you begin to become conscious of the Qi the heat is catalysing within you. Continue to sip on the water/tea, and begin to sink into this meditative silence. The more often we partake in ceremony, the easier we find it to sink into meditation and slowly, this meditative pace and appreciation for the simplest things in life will seep into your daily lives.

After the ceremony has ended, I will be opening the floor to reflections, questions, and of course, a chat. The bowls, as they come and go during the tea ceremony, is a symbolic mandala of our connection – as we sit together we drop all egos and identities are simply being ourselves, with the conscious awareness that we are also all individuals who will eventually leave this ceremony to go on with our lives. In this moment, it is my honour to sit and connect us all. In this moment that is all that matters – this very moment.